Back in my day, you had to GET UP to change the TV channel! Nobody had a "computer", we had "libraries"! They used to show two movies in a row at the theater, and everyone was quiet and composed while the movies played! Gas was under a dollar a gallon, nobody knew what an "ozone layer" was, and Luke still had a chance of getting in Leia's pants without being icky about it!

Liquid modernity is Bauman's term for the present condition of the world as contrasted with the "solid" modernity that preceded it. According to Bauman, the passage from "solid" to "liquid" modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered.

Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organise their lives. Individuals have to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don't add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like "career" and "progress" could be meaningfully applied.

Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty.

Which leads to the kind of deracinated social relations I was talking about. Some would say it can also be seen in the decline in the West of the traditional religions and the rise of loose, ad-hoc eclectic 'spirituality' where people pick'n'mix from Christianity/Hinduism/Buddhism etc. It's a kind of consumer-model new religion? The marketplace of faith.

Of course, Bauman's is only one perspective and it can be seen as a re-framing of postmodernism / late modernity. Others would say it's a quantitative rather than qualitative change and therefore not a true break with previous form(s) of modernity.

Whatever, the book above is one of my faves. I bizarrely kept finding aspects of my life / relations in it in the way that's normally only meant to happen in self-help books, not academic sociological texts.

His book 'Liquid Love' is deffo one to avoid if you've been through any heartache recently.

And if that's not enough for you, I did an ultra-emo post about it all here.

So, dumb question, but, how can anyone belonging to a particular society say with any certainty whether we're in the modern or postmodern phase? It's mostly based on technology, right? Or is it that I pay more attention to tech than anything else?

I think, sociologically at least, it's more based upon things like the collapse of meta-theories (which lumps Marxism in with Christianity, capitalism, existentialism etc), the end of the Enlightenment and other features of modernity. It can also be postmodern cultural expressions like intertexuality. Which is what, all those years ago, David Quantick was hinting at when he said 'Pop Will Eat Itself.' Or people sampling ancient jazz riffs and bunging them over breakbeats.

Or it could not exist at all. You can find many cultural facets of 'postmodernity' in plays written two thousand years ago. Soooo... go figure! Baudrillard's your feller for this but it's too early in my day to get into that moroseness.

As for Friday - you know you're risking a Rebecca Blacking there, innit?

Jyoti wrote:Which leads to the kind of deracinated social relations I was talking about.

Well I can counter with a few quotes of my own here. One that always sticks out in my mind is Arraon Copeland, in his book what to listen for in music, from the 1930's. He said "very few people actually like music, but rather, they like it as a means through which to be social". And then Grandpa Simpson from The Simpsons said "I used to be with it, then they changed what it was and now everything is weird an scary and it'll happen to you to".

I think if anything, not much has changed, except the way IT happens. People are more or less the same, at least in our snapshot of the last 100 hundred years of culture or so. I think for the most part, most people are working their jobs and paying their bills and whatever it is were talking about isn't even on the radar for them.

However for the people we are talking about, I think that Copeland and Grandpa's remarks ring quite true. I think for people that don't fit into the work a day mold, they want a sense of belonging to something huge and intrinsic. To that end, I think the internet more than anything acts as a lens, magnifying the mundane into a huge image of distorted proportions. Which for some, can also distort their view of reality.

Anyway, I'm about short of a thesis here so i'll quit while im' ahead

But I think the old adage is true, at least for right now anyway, that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Jyoti wrote:Whatever, the book above is one of my faves. I bizarrely kept finding aspects of my life / relations in it in the way that's normally only meant to happen in self-help books, not academic sociological texts.

I may be in the minority here, but I agree with grandpa Simpson more than I do Aaron Copland.While I admire his music I find his quote rather puzzling.Perhaps he was referring to a time when very few people had access to phonographs, and their exposure to music was limited to a social setting.

Music touches one soul, either emotionally or physically. It's quite possible to be by yourself and play a song that makes you want to dance, play air geetar, air drums, etc. Or if a person is sad or happy, a piece of music can comfort you, or make you feel happy.This can all be done privately without a public setting.Even in the day of early phonographs, although at that time it was limited to the wealthy, it was possible to experience the above.

So in conclusion, I think Grandpa Simpson in his simplicity is wiser and smarter than Mr.Copeland.

well what copeland was saying was that back then, people acted like people today do more or less, in that they want want to hang around a scene and be cool and be seen as it were and have the trappings of being artistic, cool and hip to wear on their sleeve like the hipster kids we poke fun at. They are the majority. Listening to music as a personal experience puts you in the minority.

that's essentially what he was saying. very few people appreciate things on a personal level and a majority of them do it out of social conformity.

I was saying that grandpa was part two of that in that it was classical music in copelands day, but in ours it's emo rock or whatever.

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